| AlfredoTurkey said: People, you need to understand something. Originality and innovation are the hardest things in all of art to pull off. They are worth more than any other single quality. So, when you're assessing "greatness"... a game like this is at the top because really, look at what it did? |
What exactly was the originality and innovation of Super Mario Bros?
It can't be the scenario... killing monsters and saving a princess / damsel in distress was the most common goal in most games these days. Mario as a hero wasn't new either (Donkey Kong games, Mario Bros.)
There have also been lots of platformers before it, many of them from Nintendo itself. But most of them didn't have sidescrolling due to hardware limitations.
Nevertheless there were also lot of vertical scrolling games and a few side-scrolling games before Super Mario Bros, many of them were shoot'em ups.
So was Super Mario Bros. the first combination of platforming and side-scrolling? It beat Wonder Boy by a year, so that was the innovation for sure, wasn't it? Er... no! Games like Jump Bug (1981) and Quest for Tires (1983) already had that combination, but they were more like the endless runners on smartphones today: you had no influence over the scrolling speed.
So was Super Mario Bros. the first combination of platforming and side-scrolling and controlling the speed of the scrolling (even stopping it)? Again: no. Pac-Man did it a whole year earlier (and a few other minor releases did it, too), it had even multi-layered parallax-scrolling in some areas:
What Super Mario Bros. did was perfecting/polishing that formula, not innovating it.
